Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday, April 3, that Israeli air strikes have destroyed 70 percent of Iran's steel production capacity — a claim made in a video statement published this morning, on the 34th day of the war. "Together with our American friends, we continue to crush the terror regime in Iran," Netanyahu said. "We are eliminating commanders, bombing bridges, bombing infrastructures. In recent days, the Air Force has destroyed 70 percent of Iran's steel production capacity." He called it "a tremendous achievement that deprives the Revolutionary Guards of both financial resources and the ability to manufacture weapons."
The claim has not been independently verified. But the underlying facts — that Iran's two largest steel plants have shut down — are confirmed by the companies themselves, by BBC reporting, by Deutsche Welle, and by commodity market coverage from Argus Media. The question is not whether the strikes happened. It is what destroying a country's steel industry actually means, and whether that constitutes a legitimate military target or an attack on civilian economic infrastructure.
What Was Struck: The Two Plants
Iran's steel industry is dominated by two facilities. Both have confirmed shutdowns.
Khuzestan Steel Company, located in Ahvaz in southwestern Iran, is one of the largest steel producers in the Middle East. Mehran Pakbin, the company's deputy head of operations, was quoted by Iranian media as saying: "Our initial estimate is that restarting these units will take at least six months and up to one year." Khuzestan Steel has halted operations entirely, according to the Wall Street Journal, cited by Deutsche Welle.
Mobarakeh Steel Company, located in Isfahan Province in central Iran, produced 7.1 million tons of steel in 2025 and generated $860 million in export revenue between March 2025 and January 2026, according to company-linked reporting cited by Deutsche Welle. Mobarakeh said its production lines had "completely shut down following the high volume of attacks." A substation, an alloy steel production line, and power generation facilities were damaged, according to GMK Center, a commodity market research firm. The Wall Street Journal reported Mobarakeh remained technically operational but at severely reduced capacity — a characterization that has since been superseded by the company's own announcement of a complete shutdown.
The strikes on both facilities were first launched by Israel in coordination with the United States, according to Israeli media and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Araghchi said Friday: "Israel has hit two of Iran's largest steel factories, a power plant and civilian nuclear sites among other infrastructure. Israel claims it acted in coordination with the US."
Iran's Steel Industry: The Scale of What Was Hit
Iran is the 10th largest producer of steel globally, according to the World Steel Association. Its annual crude steel output in 2025 was approximately 31.8 million tons, according to steelprices.com's industry data — putting it above Germany and close to Turkey in global production rankings. It accounts for more than 50 percent of total steel production in the entire Middle East, according to the industry publication juyemetal.com.
Iran's total crude steel capacity is estimated at between 55 and 58 million tons per year, according to steelprices.com. The gap between capacity and actual output reflects years of sanctions-related degradation, power shortages, and restricted access to raw materials. The strikes targeted the facilities that were still producing.
Steel is not a marginal sector for Iran's economy. It is one of the very few industries that has continued to generate significant hard-currency export revenue under comprehensive Western sanctions. Mobarakeh alone exported $860 million worth of product in a ten-month period through early 2026. The US Treasury has long treated Iranian steel as a major source of state revenue — it sanctioned entities linked to Mobarakeh Steel in 2020, pointing to the metals industry generating billions in export revenues for the regime.
Hassan Mansour, an economist who spoke to Deutsche Welle, estimated that the direct losses from the strikes may be in the range of $5 billion to $6 billion. He argued the wider damage to Iran's national economy could be far greater, with the disruption spreading into construction, manufacturing, and a wide range of downstream industrial sectors that depend on domestically produced steel.
The Military Justification: IRGC Links
Israeli officials have argued that both facilities were legitimate military targets because of their connections to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. An Israeli security source quoted by Israeli media said the strikes were expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the Iranian economy, and stated that the steel plants were "linked to the IRGC."
The IRGC's economic empire is well-documented. It controls or has financial interests in a large portion of Iran's heavy industry, including steel, construction, and energy. The US Treasury has used this linkage as the legal basis for sanctions on Iranian steel companies. Whether that link constitutes a sufficient justification for military strikes under the laws of armed conflict is a separate legal and ethical question — one that human rights organizations and international law experts have raised across multiple aspects of the U.S.-Israeli campaign.
In response to the steel plant strikes, the IRGC said it had targeted U.S.-linked steel and aluminum facilities in Gulf states. The IRGC also targeted an Amazon cloud computing center in Bahrain, according to Iranian state media — a retaliatory pattern of attacking economic and digital infrastructure that mirrors the campaign against Iranian industry.
The Civilian Economy Question
The strikes on Iranian steel have triggered a debate inside Iran about targeting. Deutsche Welle reported that Iranian public discussion has split: some see the plants as fair targets given their IRGC ties, while others see the attacks as strikes on civilian industrial infrastructure in a country already under severe sanctions pressure.
The stakes of this debate extend beyond the current war. Steel is not a military-specific input. It is the material backbone of construction, transportation, manufacturing, and basic infrastructure. Shutting down 70 percent of a country's steel production does not merely degrade its weapons-making capacity — it degrades its ability to build hospitals, repair roads, manufacture basic consumer goods, and rebuild after conflict.
The Pasteur Institute of Iran, a major public health research facility in Tehran, was struck on March 23. An Iranian pharmaceutical company that produces anesthetics and cancer drugs was hit on April 1. The bridges, power generation facilities, and now the steel industry represent a campaign that has moved well beyond military and nuclear targets. Trump has publicly embraced this scope — his April 1 address said the U.S. would bring Iran "back to the stone ages," and he celebrated the destruction of a highway bridge linking Tehran to Karaj on social media.
Verification Caveat
Iran has been under an internet blackout for 34 days as of Friday, with connectivity to the outside world at 1 percent of normal levels, according to NetBlocks. This makes independent verification of damage claims extremely difficult. The 70 percent figure comes from Netanyahu's video statement — a wartime claim made by a party with a direct interest in portraying the campaign as successful. The shutdowns at Khuzestan and Mobarakeh are confirmed by the companies themselves, but the precise extent of physical destruction is not independently verifiable from outside Iran.
What is independently confirmed: both of Iran's two largest steel producers have announced they have stopped operating. Restart estimates range from six months to one year for Khuzestan Steel alone. The economic and industrial damage is real and is being reported consistently across BBC, Deutsche Welle, Argus Media, and multiple international commodity market sources. Whether the specific figure of 70 percent is precise, approximate, or inflated for political effect cannot be determined at this time.
What Comes After
The closure of Iran's steel industry arrives on top of an oil export blockade via the Strait of Hormuz, a pharmaceutical supply disruption, a 34-day internet blackout, and the physical destruction of bridges, power plants, and nuclear facilities. An Iran-based economist told Deutsche Welle that even if the war ends without regime change, the deeper effects will become clear only after the fighting stops — and that skilled workers may choose to leave, making economic recovery harder still.
The steel shutdown has global supply chain implications as well. Iran exported steel across Asia, the Middle East, and other markets. Commodity market research firm Argus Media flagged that the attacks were expected to reduce Iran's production and export capacity, with implications for steel pricing in regional markets that relied on Iranian supply.
Iran entered this war as the 10th largest steel producer in the world. As of April 3, 2026, its two largest plants have shut down, Netanyahu has claimed 70 percent of its production capacity is gone, and independent restart estimates run to at least a year. The war is being fought in the air, on the water, in cyberspace — and now visibly inside the industrial economy of a country that is still fighting back.